For post-secondary instructors, catching a student plagiarist inspires a range of feelings: dismay; fatigue at the impending paperwork; sometimes a facetious kind of glee; and, if the offending text is especially obvious and Google-able, forehead-slapping incredulity. Plagiarism can feel like an insult not just to the writer whose work is stolen but to the reader targeted as the potential dupe. How could anyone think us so stupid, we wonder, while cannier cheats dance tauntingly beyond our grasp, diplomas in hand.
As mortal sins go, although plagiarism doesn’t crack the top seven, it does seem to provoke comparable outrage. And a teacher’s exasperation hardly compares to the wrath incurred by the pirating novelist or poet, who inspires a disdain usually reserved for history’s more malevolent dictators. That sense of betrayal speaks to readers’ trust in literature, which approaches a marriage’s compact of faith and fidelity. And so, whether purported non-fiction...
Pasha Malla is the author of six books, most recently Fugue States, a novel. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
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